lists

2008 recap in first sentences

January 5, 2009 by Susanne 1 Comment

I have seen this on quite a few blogs these past days, you take the first sentence of the first blog post of every month. The problem is that I tend to see my headline as the first sentence, so I try to make the headline exciting, and then follow it up with a very, very boring line. See for yourself:

January: As you probably have noticed I didn’t feel much like blogging these past, ahem, weeks.

Well, same old, same old. But I will get around to it someday.

February: It’s time for the just posts again.

Which means that I didn’t post anything for the first nine days of February, oops.

March: I think it was Terry Pratchett who said that if you read enough books you’ll eventually start writing because all the words filling up your brain will start seeping out.

That’s a good one, don’t you think?

April: Time for the Just Post Roundtables again!

See February.

May: The writer’s group I’m in has gone from writing really short pieces once a month to writing a story before each meeting.

This was an introduction to the first story I posted on my blog. The “Story of the Month”-category did not make a monthly appearance, though. I’m still trying, though. (I have to write another story until Thursday, stay tuned.)

June: First, thank you very much for your comments on my post about feeling fat.

Nice one, that.

July: I just spent fifteen minutes on my computer, changing the color scheme of my blog.

Changing my blog’s theme has been on my to-do-list for quite a long time because this one takes ages to load. Sorry about that.

August: Welcome again to the Just Posts.

See February, and April.

September: As I told you I ordered it the day that I sold my congas.

To understand this one you have to know that the headline was “I got my spinning wheel”. I’m still happy I traded the congas for it.

October: and I missed them both.

Again, this doesn’t make sense without the headline which read: “So, yesterday was Blog Action Day and Love Your Body Day”.

November: Again it’s the time of the month where we meet at our virtual round table and share what we found about social justice.

Just Posts again. That’s the fifth time in one year that I did the first post of the month on the tenth.

December: Sorry to let you hang for so long but just in the next 2 1/2 hours I should: take a shower, exercise, go grocery shopping, do taxes, write a real blog post, write a story for tonight’s writing group meeting, cook, and eat lunch.

This about sums up a) my life at the moment, and b) my enormous tendency to procrastinate and do things at the last minute. Needless to say that I didn’t accomplish all of this. I think I did taxes, took a shower, went grocery shopping, and ate lunch which my husband had cooked while almost keeling over because he was so unwell.

I really have high hopes for 2009. Who knows, maybe I’ll even get around to dusting the house once a week again. Or exercising. Or writing. I did quite well for the first few days this year, exercising, playing music, and doing housework but yesterday I hit a wall, and spent a lot of the day sitting around doing nothing. As I did today. when after a few hours of this I realized that, wham, it’s PMS-time again! Knocking me out for half the month. So I better get out of the house and get me some Vitamin B, and hope that will get me moving again.

6 random things about me

December 3, 2008 by Susanne 8 Comments

I have been so slow to do this meme that I have been tagged twice for it. First by Holly, and then by Katinka. Apparently there are rules. I’m all for rules, so here they are (I’m lifting them from Holly’s blog which is called “Cold Spaghetti”, an awesome blog title):

1. Link to the person who tagged you.

2. Post the rules on your blog.

3. Write six random things about yourself.

4. Tag six people at the end of your post and link to them.

5. Let each person know they’ve been tagged and leave a comment on their blog.

6. Let the tagger know when your entry is up.

So, I’ve followed rule 1 and 2 already. So far so good. (Ha! I’ve managed to use the word “so” three times in two sentences without making it extremely awkward!) I had a feeling that I already have done some “random things about me”-posts, and a quick search tells me there seems to be a “random things about me”-inflation going on because it was 8 random things about me in August 2007, and 7 random things about me in December 2007. Now it’s only six. And I always love reading what people are writing about themselves, randomly.

Just today I did find out why I’m blogging less and have the feeling that I don’t accomplish anything. Today I spent two hours getting my son to go to bed (and stay there), and I also talked to my husband for three hours. Three hours! No wonder we both have the feeling that somehow we don’t have enough time. On the other hand the time we spend talking is well spent. We have been feeling closer, and happier. We have been taking the time to look at the things we have in common instead of looking at how different we are.
For the last weeks I have spent much more time and energy thinking about the fact that I feel too fat than I feel comfortable admitting even to myself. This has not led to weight loss, I have gained another pound. I’m a bit sick of the whole thing (which I might have mentioned before). I’m hoping for my renewed enthusiasm for exercise. Maybe I can exercise while talking to my husband.
I will be meeting a handful of local bloggers on Thursday. Immediately after leaving a comment saying that I will attend (after a lengthy conference with my mother-in-law detailing the logistics of her day and my son’s day, and everybody in the family), I started panicking and wondering what to wear. Which is really pathetic because in the end I’ll wear the same thing I always wear. Only I do have a new turtleneck. (Which is funny because in my random things post from last December I lamented the lack of a “very classy and elegant turtleneck sweater” made of thick wool. Guess what I finished two days ago? A classy, elegant, thick, woolen turtleneck in red.
Leaving a comment on Frau Kaltmamsell’s blog regarding the meeting led to an immediate spike in blog traffic on my own blog. While that’s nice it’s always a bit weird when people coming from a very witty German blog reach my blog only to be greeted by a post called “Hail the gauge swatch!”. My guess is that most of them won’t come back, and that even people who might have been both interested in the content, and willing to read something in English, nevertheless will have felt the strong need for a personal translator. (When I told my husband about that particular post, the only word he could understand without an explanation at first sight was “the”.)
While I love knitting, and haven’t been doing much else these past, ahem, months or so, I have the feeling that I’m using it to retreat into my very own fiber cocoon. And while sitting quiet, and doing something meditative with my hands that helps keeping me and my family warm is really appropriate for the season, it might be time to do other things as well.
It’s only December 2nd but already I feel as if my head is spinning. I have to make three batches of muffins, and at least one batch of cookies for the kindergarten Christmas party, my son’s birthday party in kindergarten, and his birthday party at home. I have to buy a scooter, a satchel, and several other assorted birthday, and Christmas gifts for my son. (My son not so conveniently chose to be born exactly one week before Christmas, just like most of my husband’s family whose birthdays fall between December 13th and January 20th.) I don’t have anything for my parents yet, and just today I realized that the universe doesn’t end with my son’s presents, there are other people to consider as well. Also this year I will have to attend then kindergarten Christmas party alone because my husband found that re-scheduling those particular four students that he teaches on Wednesday afternoons was impossible. I, on the other hand, managed to find a way to move four students elsewhere and will be rushing from teaching to Christmas party in festive attire (cross your fingers for me that I can wear the new sweater with the red skirt, otherwise I will have to wear jeans), with guitar, sheet music, two dozen muffins, and a music stand in tow.

Now I’ll have to tag six people. Um. It’s not that I don’t know six bloggers, it isn’t even that I’m not interested in reading six random things about them, but please, it’s almost midnight, and I’ll have to get up at seven. How about everyone who wants to do a six things about me post just does it and says so in the comments? Please? And anybody who doesn’t have a blog like “luzilla” can leave six random things in the comments. That would be cool.

How I did with my goals

November 15, 2008 by Susanne 4 Comments

Two weeks ago I wrote about some fancy new goals that I had set for myself. I thought I’d try this “public accountability” everybody is talking about these days. Of course I thought I’d be back to report a week later but I wasn’t. Mostly because I had this really annoying persistent cough that made me want to do nothing but stay in bed all day. My goals were:

only eat at mealtimes. That is: breakfast, lunch, afternoon snack, and dinner.
exercise at least three times a week for at least 30 minutes. Walking while doing errands doesn’t count.
play guitar or piano for at least ten minutes a day.
post on my blog 3 times a week.
write at least 100 words of fiction every day.
meditate every day for at least 10 minutes, and write morning pages.

I did quite well for about five days by the way. I went walking almost every day, I played guitar and piano, I wrote my words, and I was quite consistent with the meditation and morning pages. Meditation and morning pages has been something I have been doing for years, and so it wasn’t that hard to get back into that. Playing music and writing fiction was a bit harder because I found I never got around to it until late in the evening, and so I really only played for ten minutes, and I stopped writing after 120 words or so. But even when I felt like I was much too tired for writing or playing I enjoyed it nonetheless. And a 100 words isn’t much. It takes me less than 10 minutes. Also I never got the feeling that the story was making much progress at that rate. But then I wrote about 700 words on it in five days.

And then I felt terrible because of the coughing, and then, and then, and so I let everything slide. I’m still doing quite well with points 2 and 6. You can see for yourselves that the blog-posting three times a week did not happen. I may have to resign myself to the fact that these days it’s more about twice a week if that.

You might have noticed that I didn’t write about the first goal on my list. Ahem. This is the goal that I didn’t reach once in the past two weeks. Not once. I definitely won’t be making any rules around food and eating for the moment. I don’t stick to them anyway. Which is extremely frustrating. But it doesn’t help if I pretend that it’s different.

So, I’m suspending the setting of goals again. What I did find out about myself was that I can only concentrate on one thing at a time. Before setting my new goals I was on the way to get a better grip on housework again, but the minute I concentrated on my new list, I got lax about housework again.

And then I got sick, and then I started knitting a sweater that I want to have right this minute, and that meant I have been doing nothing but knitting for the past week. I started it last Sunday, and if I can go on like I did last week it will be finished by next weekend. And while I really would like to accomplish other things too, there is something very, very nice about sitting around and knitting a warm ruby-red sweater while reading Miss Marple novels. So I’ll just do that for the rest of the weekend.

So for me, obviously, public accountability doesn’t work.

In response to my post about goals PiaPessoa said she wanted to work on exercising two times a week. I’d like to hear how that went. And Anne said that I should strive to reach the point where a new habit is like brushing your teeth. She is totally right with this, of course, and when I strive to form new habits it always helps me to remember how long it took me to brush my teeth twice a day without fail. You know, as a child I was taught to brush my teeth in the mornings only. And I did so for years. Then it occurred to me that brushing them in the mornings and evenings might be a good course of action. I think I tried to bring myself to brush my teeth in the evenings too when I was about eight years old. I never succeeded until I was about twenty. And then I lost the habit again, and had to re-install it when I was about ten years older. These days I never would go to bed without brushing my teeth first. So I finally reached that stage of forming a new habit where I do it every day without fail. But it took me about 22 years to reach that stage. 22 years!

There must be a way to speed that up. Really.

Things which I wanted to write about but didn’t

November 7, 2008 by Susanne 4 Comments

how to learn to love exercise
how becoming a musician has changed the way I hear music
how giddy I felt because my husband has borrowed a drum set
how proud I then felt when my son played the drums
how much my son has grown in the past few months and how sweet he is looking with his blonde curls, blue eyes, and almost skater-like clothes
how happy the beret I made from my handspun makes me, and how happy I was knitting it
how I made a sweater out of yarn that I bought more than twenty years ago, and how much sentimental value that wool holds
how I still long to be cool, and how much I associate coolness with a certain kind of clothes
how I often feel that there are many different persons inside of me, and that I should dress accordingly
how I realized again today that the things that are most ordinary to me are quite extra-ordinary to others, when a friend of my son – who wanted to look at the borrowed drum-set – exclaimed, “Wow! You have a lot of guitars!”, and my son said, “These are my father’s guitars. That’s his favorite one, it’s a Jaguar. Shall I show you my mother’s guitars? I have a guitar too.” And we didn’t even tell him about the two that live on the wardrobe in the bedroom because we don’t use them. And the violin.
how I’m doing with my Christmas knitting
how I’m doing with reaching the goals I set for myself last Saturday (mostly good, totally bad on one account; I’ll keep you posted)
how pleased I am with what I’m currently spinning, and how I hope to make the yarn into a sweater someday (there are still about 400 grams left to spin, and – as I mentioned before – that particular sweater will make me look about as sombre as a parrot covered in tropical flowers)
how Germans celebrate Christmas, New Years Eve, Carnival, or Easter. Or the first day of school.
how much I’d be pleased if you sent me your links for the October Just Posts roundtable (You can send me links to any post about social justice written in the parenting blogosphere that you wrote or read.

Setting goals – again

November 1, 2008 by Susanne 5 Comments

I’ve been thinking a lot about losing weight and changing habits these past days. I even read one personal weight loss story book (“Der Kilo-Killer: Ein Jahr im Schlankheitswahn), and one book about self-motivation (“So zähmen Sie Ihren inneren Schweinehund!”). Since Thursday.

That’s a very common pattern with me, I feel lost, I want to change something, I buy a book. Only this time I’m quite proud of myself because I didn’t buy the books but got them from the library. And I’m glad that I did because while they did help me with the thinking I don’t need to have them here to look things up or anything.

Anyways, I decided to set some goals for November, and so I made another list. For the next week (maybe longer) I will:

only eat at mealtimes. That is: breakfast, lunch, afternoon snack, and dinner.
exercise at least three times a week for at least 30 minutes. Walking while doing errands doesn’t count.
play guitar or piano for at least ten minutes a day.
post on my blog 3 times a week.
write at least 100 words of fiction every day.
meditate every day for at least 10 minutes, and write morning pages.

I’m very tired of thinking about food and being fat all the time. And I’m not even sure if I want to do something to lose weight. So the first goal is my attempt at minimizing the energy I’m spending on thinking about eating. Also it’ll minimize mindless stuffing of food into my mouth.
I know that 30 minutes of exercise three times a week doesn’t sound much. But it’s doable. And by not specifying what I will do I leave room to just go for a nice walk if I’m not motivated to do “real” exercise. By the way, since setting that goal two days ago I already have been going on walks twice.

Playing guitar or piano for ten minutes a day likewise really isn’t much. But I know from experience that I do much better with setting small goals so that I don’t feel like a failure. Often when I sit down to play I will play longer than ten minutes. Actually, once I have started I often enjoy myself very much. Getting myself to sit down and start playing, on the other hand, is quite hard.

I have been struggling with writing on my blog. I feel that three times a week is about the perfect frequency for me both as a blogger and as a reader.But often I spend so much time on the net reading that I don’t sit down to actually write down the blog posts that are floating around in my head.

It’s time for NaNoWriMo again, and it does make me kind of sad to not participate this year. On the other hand I’m also really relieved that I’m not doing it this year. So this is like my “Ersatz-NaNo”. I’m using the same kind of energy to get some writing done.

The last point is something I have been doing for years but I found myself slipping, and skipping more often. So I’m re-installing this habit.
Of course I’m writing this to make myself accountable. You, my dear readers, are the ones who will be helping to keep me on track. I’m doing this because next week will be fall break (yeah, I know there are a lot of breaks around here) which will give me about two additional hours in the day to do what I want.
I’ll tell you how it went at the end of next week. Anything you want to accomplish? You can post your goals in the comments, or on your blogs and I’ll link to them.

And, whoosh, the week went by

October 24, 2008 by Susanne 3 Comments

I’m feeling a bit stupid (again), here I am, realizing that the last post I wrote was about weekend to-do-lists, and all of a sudden it’s time for a new weekend. I could swear they are making the weeks shorter, and shorter these days.

I had wanted to write posts about how to learn to love exercise, about me and my son, how we had weeks of fighting and yelling, and now it’s all getting better, about how this same son wakes up early every single day now, so that my poor husband who doesn’t respond well to the traditional fighting over getting dressed, fighting over breakfast, and fighting to get out of the house on time, especially when he had been woken an hour early, resigned himself to sleeping in the guest room, well, I wanted to write about the usual things.

Also I have been on a finishing frenzy, knitting-wise. I’m just about to finish a cardigan, and a huge lace shawl, and then, today, in the middle of the day, just a few minutes before my first student of the day was to arrive I decided to do something wild and crazy and start a completely irrational project just like that.

But then I looked at the yarn and saw that it needed to be wound into balls before I can use it, and while I might be crazy enough to try and start a project in ten minutes, I’m clear enough to see that ten minutes doesn’t work if you have to wind the yarn first.

Time for the next weekend to-do-list, I think.